While perhaps not the last word when it comes to gauging the installed base for industrial maintenance software, results of the Plant Engineering Purchasing Considerations for Maintenance Management Software survey highlighted respondents’ perception and awareness of the importance of software applications in the automation of plant-floor and production processes.

To start, survey respondents estimated the average costs of unplanned downtime at about $108,000, very much in line with other industry estimates of what can be a crippling cost.

Nearly three-fifths (59%) of respondents identified their maintenance software system as being a computerized maintenance management software (CMMS) as opposed to a more sophisticated enterprise management system (EAM), at 39%. Presumably, based on the results, nearly 30% of those respondents also worked with some other plant floor, manufacturing execution or other type application.

Almost half of respondents (48%) said their maintenance solution is installed on-premise, while 30% raised their hand for having cloud-based or hybrid solutions (22%). Moreover, nearly one-fifth (18%) say their cloud or hybrid-based solution is delivered as a service.

More than 60% of respondents see widespread migration from on-premises to cloud computing, while only 30% of respondents said they weren’t either planning or already moving to the cloud.

One of the more interesting survey takeaways included that 64% of respondents said that to retain their business EAM vendors had to demonstrate their capabilities for system integration, the number one response.

Finally, when asked how much customization was asked for before implementing their current system, 17% said “not as much as we should have” and 7% said “more than we should have.”

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